WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury has hit out at Joe Joyce for refusing the offer he made to Joyce and rejecting his help to help Joyce prepare for his rematch with Zhilei Zhang this upcoming Saturday in London.
Fury would make the offer to Joyce [15-1 14KOs] following the sixth-round defeat he suffered at the hands of Zhang [25-1-1 20KOs] due to the accumulation of damage sustained to his right eye. That is not the start and the end of the contest. Joyce would struggle with the southpaw style of Zhang and ultimately be outclassed and sometimes outfought.
An invite to train with Fury was made to Joyce to move and train with the WBC champion in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire with Fury promising Joyce ‘as many rounds as he wanted’ in the southpaw style. Ultimately, Joyce would take himself to Las Vegas to train with long-time and celebrated trainer Ismael Salas instead.
In the lead-up to his rematch with Zhang, Joyce promised to be heavier and more prepared for the task at hand this upcoming weekend after admitting that he had underestimated Zhang prior to the pair’s original contest in April.
When speaking to Dev Shani of Queensberry Promotions, Fury stated that he believed Joyce would have suffered defeat in the original contest prior to his offer of help. Ultimately, Fury was upset that his kind offer was rejected and stated, ‘You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped.’
“He got beat like I thought he would,” Fury told Dev Shani for Queensberry Promotions. “Me and Shane [his brother] thought that Zhang would beat him. I actually thought that Joe would have to get up off the floor a couple of times and claw a win back, maybe, if he took him a few rounds. Obviously, he didn’t, and he got beat.
“I told Joe - live on the internet - that if he came to Morecambe Bay, I’d almost guarantee him a win over Zhang. He didn’t, he went to Vegas. You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped. It is what it is.”
Ultimately, Zhang and his handlers are confident of a repeat result against Joyce, with co-manager Terry Lane speaking recently about possibly challenging Fury himself for the WBC world title. Fury continues to add that he sees Zhang as a harder test for him than unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk.
Fury was pushed how he would defeat Zhang, considering that he proposed to train Joyce, remaining tight-lipped. Fury finalised that Joyce would have ultimately ‘smashed’ Zhang and is backing Zhang to achieve a similar result against Joyce this weekend.
“I can’t tell you that. That would be giving my training secrets away, but let me just say, make no mistakes about it, if Joe had come up to Morecombe Bay, he would have smashed Zhang,” Fury said. “Now I’m not so sure. You have to favour the Chinese man, purely on the fact that he’s already beaten him once, and if he doesn’t do something different in the next fight and it goes down the same road, he’ll beat him again.
“I think he’s a very tough opponent and he’s a big southpaw punching man. He’s not like Usyk, a feather duster jibbing and jabbing around the ring. This man is trying to take your brains out. He’s 6ft 6in and twenty stone. He’s a very different customer and very dangerous.”
